10-Year Plan

On Tuesday, October 22, 2002, at 05:33 PM, Arthur P. Smith wrote:

> Now launch costs do improve with time; probably we can expect
> somewhere around 20% per year.

Sounds pretty optimistic. Do you have data for the last 5-10 years?
That would give a good idea of what one might expect if we haven't hit
any walls or see a breakthrough.

The dinosaurs were destroyed by an asteroid because they weren't
space-faring. It's almost as if Gaia then thought "Well, dinosaurs
worked pretty well, but space-faring is necessary. Maybe I'll should
try mammals this time." Humanity is now developing systems to detect and
deflect asteroids, and could build orbital space colonies to spread
beyond Earth to insure life would survive a planetary catastrophe.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html